Jazz, Slavery, and West African Music

Study Notes

West African musical characteristics significantly influenced jazz.
These elements include improvisation, drumming, percussive sounds, and complex rhythms.
"Call and response" is a crucial technique in West African music and early jazz.

Enslaved Africans in America often used music to express their experiences, offer solace, and communicate coded messages.
Spirituals were passed down through oral tradition.
They frequently contained hidden meanings and messages that were used to communicate covertly amongst slaves.
Common themes in spirituals were about freedom and escape.

All spirituals seemingly referenced sacred ideas.
Examples included "The River Jordan," "Battle of Jericho," and others.
However, these spirituals often contained covert messages of freedom.
Some speculated that they were used as a form of communication during slave patrols, referring to escape routes.

Early jazz also incorporated music from European/white Americans.
These influences included hymns, popular songs, folk tunes, dances, marches, and piano music.

Marching bands were a prominent part of American life.
These bands, often including trumpets, trombones, clarinets, tubas, and drums, heavily influenced early jazz.
Jazz bands adopted many of these instruments in their own composition.

New Orleans was a vibrant center for jazz development from 1900 to 1917.
The city's diversity (African, French, Spanish, etc.) contributed to its unique jazz forms.
Storyville, a district of brothels, dance halls, and saloons became a hotspot for improvisation and experimentation (in music).

Jazz is a diverse, complex genre.
Common elements prior to 1950 include tone color, improvisation, rhythm, melody, and harmony.
Tone Color: The use of brass and woodwind instruments in jazz is distinct. Jazz musicians focus on their individuality of sound.
Improvisation: The heart of jazz. Music creation live on the spot is key to the jazz experience. Jazz songs often alternate pre-composed and improvised sections.
Rhythm is characterised by syncopation (accented notes between beats) and swing (uneven rhythmic feel).
Melody and Harmony: Jazz melodies are flexible, allowing performers to deviate from notated rhythms to create their own unique feel. They often include "bent" or "blue" notes (lowered pitch tones).

Ragtime, composed primarily by African Americans between the 1890s and 1915, was a piano music style.
Initially performed in Midwest and South saloons and dance halls, it later achieved national popularity due to sheet music sales.
Ragtime used European musical forms (marches, dances). However, it blended them with African-American rhythms.
Scott Joplin, a prominent ragtime composer, was a classically trained pianist and composer, despite the fact that his father had been a slave.

A new style of jazz emerging in the 1930s and 1940s.
The decades were known as the "Swing Era."
Swing is performed predominantly by large bands.
Its powerful sound filled dance halls and ballrooms.
Swing music gained enormous popularity through live performances and radio. Its popularity was symbolized by Benny Goodman’s historic jazz concert at Carnegie Hall.
In reaction to the 18th Amendment, there was a subsequent explosion of social venues that featured swing music.

Emerging in the early 1940s, bebop was a reaction against the commercialism of swing.
It was designed for listening, not dancing.
Bebop was a challenging new style, characterized by complex rhythms, harmonies, and improvisations.
Its sophisticated harmonic complexities, and unpredictable rhythms greatly challenged many.
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie emerged as important bebop figures.

A more relaxed and calmer subgenre emerging in late 1940s and 50s, often associated with the LP record format.
It evolved out of bebop but emphasized a more mellow, relaxed feel.
Often employing a lesser emphasis on improvisation, cool jazz embraced pre-written arrangements.
Miles Davis, a famous bebop artist, had also developed a style of cool jazz that used unconventional instruments like the French horn, flute, and cello.

A fusion of jazz and rock became popular in the 1960s and 70s.
Characteristics of rock music started influencing jazz, leading to new innovations.
Musicians like Miles Davis, Chick Corea, Chuck Mangione, and Maynard Ferguson were at the forefront of this genre.
Amplified instruments, rock rhythms, and harmonic structures.
Jazz rock also brought in new ethnic influences, such as Middle Eastern and Latin American sounds.